Megaupload users face data deletion US prosecutors warn

US prosecutors have said that data belonging to Megaupload users and stored by third parties could be deleted as soon as Thursday.

 

Visitors to megaupload.com are now presented with a message from US law enforcement

 

 Users have been unable to access data since the file-sharing service was raided.
The warning was made in a letter filed by the US Attorney's Office.
Megaupload's lawyer Ira Rothken told the Associated Press that at least 50 million users had data which could be deleted.
Mr Rothken said that freezing of Megaupload's funds meant it was unable to pay those who were storing its data.
'Cautiously optimistic' In the letter US prosecutors said that the data which might be deleted was being held by the storage companies Carpathia Hosting and Cogent Communications Group.
"It is our understanding that the hosting companies may begin deleting the contents of the servers beginning as early as 2 February," it said.
The letter explains that in its investigations the US "copied selected data" but did not remove any servers from the premises of either company.
It goes on to note that the data "remains at the premises controlled by, and currently under the control of Carpathia and Cogent.
"Should the defendants wish to obtain independent access... that issue must be resolved directly with Cogent or Carpathia."
However, in a statement Carpathia said: "Carpathia Hosting does not have, and has never had, access to the content on Megaupload servers and has no mechanism for returning any content residing on such servers to Megaupload's customers.
"The reference to the 2 Feb 2012 date in the Department of Justice letter for the deletion of content is not based on any information provided by Carpathia to the US Government."
The company said that users seeking to recover their data would need to contact Megaupload.
Cogent has not responded to an email sent by the BBC.
Earlier Megaupload's lawyer, Mr Rothken had told the Associated Press that he was "cautiously optimistic" that a deal could be done to save the data from being wiped.
He said that the information would be needed by the defence.
Legitimate data Megaupload was shut down on 19 January.
It had about 150 million registered users, making it one of the most popular file-sharing services in the world.
US authorities are seeking to extradite founder Kim Dotcom, also known as Kim Schmitz, and three other defendants from New Zealand to the US.
Prosecutors have accused it of costing copyright holders more than $500m (£320m) in lost revenue.
But a number of users have said that they have been unable to access legitimately uploaded material as a result of the legal action.
After the shutdown one user tweeted, "I'm vehemently against copyright infringement: the files I lost were created & owned by me for my job."

Megaupload founder denied bail by New Zealand court

The founder of file-sharing website Megaupload has been denied bail by a New Zealand court. 

 

German national Kim Dotcom - also known as Kim Schmitz - was arrested with three others in Auckland on 20 January in a raid requested by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

He has been accused of internet piracy and money laundering.

Meanwhile, US officials said Dutch police had arrested a fifth suspect - Andrus Nomm, 32.

A US indictment identifies Mr Nomm as a citizen of Estonia and head of Megaupload's Development Software Division.

Mr Dotcom's lawyers have said his company simply offered online storage, and that their client is innocent.

Judge David McNaughton said that Mr Dotcom posed a flight risk and remanded him in custody until 22 February, when US authorities' application for Mr Dotcom's extradition will be heard.

Prosecutor Anne Toohey had previously argued that there was a danger Mr Dotcom would try to flee the country, citing his multiple passports, financial resources and previous criminal convictions for hacking and insider trading.

Judge McNaughton also pointed to the discovery of a gun in the raid in which Mr Dotcom was arrested as a factor in denying bail.

"The applicant's unlawful possession of the firearm is another factor which weighs in the balance," he said, according to Fairfax News.

"It suggests a level of criminality which to my mind could easily extend to exploiting criminal connections to obtain false travel documents and leave the country undetected," he added.

Mr Dotcom holds German and Finnish passports, and is a resident of Hong Kong and New Zealand.

US federal prosecutors have accused Megaupload - one of the internet's largest file-sharing sites before it was shut down last week - of costing copyright holders more than $500m (£320m) in lost revenue.

Megaupload, on the other hand, said it was diligent in responding to complaints about pirated material.

Hackers retaliate over Megaupload website shutdown

Hackers have targeted the US government and copyright organisations following the shutdown of the Megaupload file-sharing website.

Megaupload displayed a video with celebrity endorsements before it was shut down

 

The Department of Justice (DoJ), FBI and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) among others have been bombarded with internet traffic.
Web links have been been distributed which, when clicked, make the user's computer part of the attack.
A statement attributed to Anonymous claimed responsibility.
Blackout protest The DoJ announced on Thursday that it had taken action to force Megaupload and related domain names offline, and had charged the firm's co-founders and others with violating piracy laws.
Four of the employees have been arrested in Auckland, New Zealand, at the request of the US authorities.

 Four Megaupload employees appeared in court in New Zealand

Police also seized cash, valuable cars and a short-barrelled shotgun from the residence of the website's German founder, Kim Dotcom, formerly known as Kim Schmitz.
They appeared in court on Friday. One of their lawyers initially objected to media requests for photographs, but the accused said that they did not mind "because we have nothing to hide".
Their Hong Kong-based site had around 150 million users and 50 million daily hits. It had received celebrity endorsements from the model Kim Kardashian and singers Alicia Keys and Kanye West among others, making it one of the net's most high-profile file sharing sites.
The business had said it had been diligent in responding to complaints about pirated material.
News of the arrests came the day after thousands of websites had taken part in a "blackout" to protest against proposed anti-piracy laws; however, the DoJ suggested the two matters were not related.
A statement from the department noted that a grand jury indictment against the Megaupload employees was issued on 5 January.

'Unwanted traffic'
Hours later a statement linked to the @AnonymousWiki twitter account announced: "We Anonymous are launching our largest attack ever on government and music industry sites. Lulz. The FBI didn't think they would get away with this did they? They should have expected us."
It said that 10 sites had been taken offline in response to the Megaupload shutdown including the FBI, Universal Music, RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and Hadopi - the French government agency responsible for "protecting creative works on the internet".
On Friday, Universal's webpage said: "This site is under maintenance. Please expect it to be back shortly."
 Hadopi was also offline, reporting "technical problems". However, the other sites on the Anonymous list all loaded.
Security firm Sophos's blog said that the attacks were carried out by spreading links via Twitter and other parts of the internet which carried out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

"If you visit the webpage, and do not have Javascript disabled, you will instantly, without user interaction, begin to flood a website of Anonymous's choice with unwanted traffic, helping to perpetuate a DDoS attack," it said.
It noted that such attacks were illegal, meaning that users taking part in the action were breaking the law.
A tweet from one of the accounts associated with Anonymous suggested that efforts were also being made to resurrect Megaupload.
The attached link intermittently directed users to a site that resembled the shut down service. The address used a .bz domain name signalling it was registered in Belize.
However, one blogger warned that the site might be a scam designed to steal information from visitors to the page.
"Whenever file-sharing services go down, scammers and opportunists work quickly to ride on the wave of publicity generated by the targeted site's demise," said Andy Maxwell, co-editor of Torrentfreak.com.
"Megaupload is not yet 'back' and any site claiming to be them or says they're acting on their behalf should not be trusted."

Confusion
Analysts say that there is a risk that the Anonymous campaign could become confused with the broader campaign against the House of Representatives' Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the Senate's Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa).
"The action against the US bills was based on websites voluntarily censoring themselves in order to protest the restriction and damage to the internet that these laws would cause," Dr Joss Wright, a fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, told the BBC.

 An unidentified group claims it is trying to return Megaupload to the web

"In one sense the actions of Anonymous are themselves, anonymously and unaccountably, censoring websites in response to positions with which they disagree.
"The goals of many Anonymous activists are a free and open internet, but the regular and blanket denial-of-service campaigns could easily be counter-productive if pro-Sopa and pro-Pipa advocates can portray these actions as representative of those who are against this legislation."

Piracy debate
Elsewhere, the inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, added his support to the campaign against Sopa.
He told the Inquirer the internet needed to be protected as an open space, adding that: "Folks in the UK should not be complacent. There are plenty of laws they should look out for already on the books that also have issues."
His comment may be a reference to the UK's Digital Economy Act, passed in 2010 but not fully implemented, and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which has the backing of the EU's Council of Ministers but has yet to be ratified by the European Parliament.
Candidates for the Republican Party's presidential nomination also weighed in on the matter at a debate on Thursday night.
Newt Gingrich said: "The bill in its current form is written really badly and leads to a range of censorship that is totally unacceptable."

Cyberattack prevented from crippling DOJ website

WASHINGTON – (Fox News) A former senior intelligence official tells Fox News the justice department pulled its website offline Thursday evening, following signs hackers planned a denial of service attack on the site -- an assault clearly linked to arrests in New Zealand of a massive, worldwide piracy ring.

Hackers aligned with the global cyber-collective known as Anonymous claimed responsibility Thursday for taking down at least six prominent websites, including those of the U.S. Department of Justice and Universal Music Group. The hackers said their actions were retaliation for the shutdown of content-sharing site Megaupload.com and the arrest of several related to the site.

But the intelligence official tells a slightly different story, saying there were signs early on a cyberassault was imminent. The denial of service attack on the justice department website brought a surge of Internet traffic -- raising it from 50 hits a minute to beyond 1,000 hits -- at which point the DOJ took the site offline to install filters based on the incoming IP addresses.

Fox is told the incident lasted about 5 hours.

“The investigation is like a fresh crime scene,” the source told Fox News. “You got a body and a guy holding a smoking gun, but you don’t know if he’s the one who pulled the trigger. In this case whether Anonymous is really behind it.”

On at least four other occasions, the source said, there were inklings the DOJ site was being targeted -- incidents that did not pan out. And this type of attack will only become more frequent in the future, General Dale Meyerrose with Harris Corp. told Fox News earlier this week.

"I think that we're going to start seeing more and more of these things as the tool of choice. Because it's high-value payback, but it's really low risk," he said. Meyerrose, who served as chief information officer in three major U.S. Air Force Commands and was the director of Command Control Systems, Headquarters North American Aerospace Defense Command, said a major arrest could serve to deter the brazen hackers. 

"The [fear] that someone is actually going to suffer the consequence for carrying out either a propaganda, a retribution or maybe even a trial run of some future operation is, is really the key, the element of this whole thing."

The FBI’s special cyber taskforce was a central part of the investigation, and the Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) stated that it assisted the DOJ and FBI in their investigation. 

The cyberattack was one in a series of assaults Thursday night, all of which the Anonymous collective claimed responsibility for. Following outages at Universalmusic.com, the websites of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the group threatened that the FBI's website would be hacked next.

"Word has it that FBI.gov is next to go down ... will report when it is," a Twitter account affiliated with the group said.

The account, under the name @YourAnonNews identifies itself on Twitter as the infamous hacker collective, saying "We are Anonymous, We are legion, We never forgive, We never forget, Expect us."

Earlier Thursday, the FBI shut down Megaupload.com and charged the site's founders and five others with Internet piracy crimes for running "an international organized criminal enterprise."

"The government takes down Megaupload? 15 minutes later Anonymous takes down government & record label sites," the group wrote earlier Thursday.

"Megaupload was taken down w/out SOPA being law. Now imagine what will happen if it passes. The Internet as we know it will end. FIGHT BACK," the group added, in a reference to the ongoing battle in Congress over the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

The proposed legislation would crack down on the online sharing of pirated copies of music, movies and other material.

Investigators said there was no connection between arrests in their two-year investigation of Megaupload.com and the political firestorm that erupted this week over the pending vote on SOPA.